JURY COMMENTS

The jury members would first like to congratulate all the teams that participated in the CCA’s 17th Charrette. During seventeen years, some 700 teams, made up of over 2000 students and recent graduates, have devoted over 80,000 hours of enthusiasm and idea generation to the cause of our built environment and its future―representing a major intellectual investment and an unparalleled treasure.

In a world where everything is compared, 80,000 hours of creativity could be equated with an $8-million investment in the markets of our various disciplines. From this perspective, the 2011 cohort will have invested some $600,000 of imagination and concrete commitment to our world. There is no denying the major contribution of this free artistic enterprise. This year’s participants, and all those who came before them, deserve our appreciation. Bravo!

This year, the theme was water in the city, its defining role and its appropriation: “An essential element in the development of any project today,” according to jury member James Brown. After examining the project images and viewing the video submissions, the jury would like to congratulate all participants for their ethical commitment and civic conviction, evident regardless of each team’s particular approach.

Formally, the jury noted that the projects fell into three main categories:

Projects on very large urban territories;
Projects on urban fragments;
Projects on urban objects.

Since the city exists in all these dimensions, the jury’s choice of projects supports the idea that the issue of water in the life of the city must be considered on all of these scales: from the very large (the urban territory) to the very small (the object), from city planning right through to its appropriation. The jury believes that, together, the six projects selected reflect a full idea of the city and our relationship to water.

The jury’s selection celebrates urban syncretism, but it is also an expression of each jury member’s personal preferences. While some valued the programmatic aspect, mysterious quality or entertainment value of one proposal, others appreciated the spatial and material elements, event-oriented nature or aesthetics of another project. The jury’s choices also reveal their expectations of the physical and spatial qualities that urban planners, landscape architects, architects and industrial designers must produce in their professional work.

Lastly, the jury members would like to give a tip-of-the-hat to the creativity of the video submissions. Is video a design, process or communication tool? Observation, investigation, revelation, declaration, pamphlet or visual poetry? Faced with so many possibilities for developing and conveying an idea, the jury recognizes the evocative power of these works in the world of mass communication, cinema, television and the web, in the context of designing, promoting and realizing projects in the public and private spheres.

The video initiative of the CCA Interuniversity Charrette 2011 may well pave the way for video as a new form of project design and communication. This new tool opens up frontiers that must be explored and embodied by our disciplines so that we can tap into the collective and civic imagination.

Will the CCA Interuniversity Charrette 2011 include video winners? Stay tuned...

TWO FIRST-PRIZES

Team 78: Hydro cosm
Lance Moore, Alexandre Hamel, Maxime Leclerc (McGill University)

Poster

Video

Team 26 : Down with the Linear-Functionnal
Gabrielle Poirier, Gabrielle Marcoux, Philippe Larocque, Marc-Antoine Chartier-Primeau (McGill University)

Poster

Video

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Team 34 : Le marais
Nathaniel Proulx Joanisse, Bernard-Félix Chénier, Sabrina Fleurent-Nourry, Benoit Avarello, Steve Fortier Evers (Université de Montréal et Université Laval)